Dear Loadstar Team,
I hope this message finds you well. I wanted to reach out to you personally before doing anything else, as Loadstar holds such a unique and special place in Commodore 64 history, and the last thing we would want to do is approach your community without your knowledge or blessing first.
My name is Anthony Caulfield and I am one of the directors of Gracious Films, a UK based independent documentary production company with 15 years of experience making films on gaming and computing history. Our films include From Bedrooms to Billions, The Amiga Years, The PlayStation Revolution and The Rubber-Keyed Wonder.
We recently launched a Kickstarter campaign for our new feature documentary, Commodore 64: The Birth of a Cultural Icon, covering the full story of the C64 from its creation in 1981 right through to its remarkable revival in 2025. We are delighted to say the campaign has now passed its funding goal, currently standing at just over sixty thousand pounds with around nineteen days still remaining, so the film itself is officially happening.
What we are focused on now is stretch goals, and the thinking behind that is simple. The single most expensive part of a film like this is licensing third party archive footage from major news agencies and footage houses around the world, material that is genuinely costly but adds enormous authenticity and nostalgia to the finished documentary. Every pound raised beyond the original goal goes directly toward unlocking more of that archive, along with additional content and bonus features for backers.
Given that Loadstar was such a central part of the American C64 experience for over two decades, and given the genuinely remarkable preservation work being done through Loadstar CE today, we wondered whether this might be something your community would find interesting. Reaching American C64 fans specifically has proven harder than we expected, and a community that lived through the disk magazine era so directly feels like exactly the right place to share this.
We would be delighted to gift complimentary viewing links to all of our previous films to anyone who would like them, as well as a copy of the completed C64 documentary when it is finished. No strings attached, it is simply our way of saying thank you for everything Loadstar has meant to this community across so many years.
The campaign is here if useful to take a look:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/graciousfilms/the-commodore-64-the-birth-of...
Thank you so much for your time and for the remarkable work being done to keep Loadstar alive.
With warm regards,
Anthony Caulfield
Co-Director, Gracious Films
anthonyc@graciousfilms.com